Cooking With Richard

& no internet … That’s why there are no updates at the moment.

I’m sending this using the extremely expensive and very slow Internet connection through my mobile phone.

Photos of the new house shortly.

Update:

This is freaky …

Wikipedia has a page explaining how magic sand is made. 日本語で。

Viet Garden on Liverpool Road in Angel is a pretty damn fine and very informal Vietnamese restaurant. Here are some of the things we ate …

Vietnamese pancake:

Another of their specials, beef wrapped with sweet betel leaves:

Tilapia – here I’m eating the head:

This is what we ordered*.

* I take no responsibility if they’ve changed the numbering since I wrote this. In fact I take no responsibility for anything at all ever.

Earlier …

How do you chop an onion? I guess most people start by chopping the ends off and peeling it, but here’s another method which is particularly useful.

Don’t peel it. First of all chop it in half. Make sure that the root stays intact because that is going to hold the onion together while we slice it up:

Now take the top-end off:

and peel:

This is the clever bit. The onion is still held together by the root, so we cut it four or five times from top to root, but again not cutting through the root so the onion stays together:

Now the onion can be sliced laterally to dice it:

and presto, a fine diced onion with very little effort:

Do you have a better way?

Beetroot soup with feta cheese (from Hugh’s River Cottage book).

I’m not really a fan of beetroot, having been forced to eat it as a kid. This was ok – would have worked better as a chilled gaspacho-type of soup.

The lemon chicken, from the 1970s cookbook, is really fantastic. And easy to make.

N-sama had two helpings!

I want an egg cuber, like this one!

No one sells them in the UK, and the stupid US stores don’t ship to “international”-land.

The title is a reference to this book which I read as a child.

Update

Egg molds

Paprikash is a traditional Hungarian casserole. At its base is a large quantity of onions which are slow cooked and dissolve into a sweet sauce. The name comes from the paprika (ground up red sweet peppers) which is added in large quantities to give it a red-brown colour and slightly hot taste. In Hungary paprikash is made with chickens, or hearts, livers or other offal.

This recipe comes from Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s Meat book. It has lots of cheap offal, bought from Oriental City – four pigs tongues, two pigs hearts and a pig liver:

Tomatoes roasted with garlic in the oven for 45 minutes, then I pushed them through a sieve to leave just a rich tomato sauce.

I used five white onions (about 2½ lbs weight). Richard wept:

Update: A small side project: lemons preserved in salt. It takes at least two weeks for the salt to cure the lemons.

Update: Dusk across the valley:

Update: Arcade games in … food:

(from http://eatpes.com/game_over.html)

Another little friend in the bathroom, possibly a pregnant mummy daddy long legs.

What’s interesting is that these fellows are only about ¼” long, and so you don’t normally see the large eyes or the detailed yellow and red colouring of the body. Fascinating insects!

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A few odds and ends to clear up tonight.

First off, I made Bread and Butter Pudding for the first time ever, and it came out absolutely superb. The recipe is from Mary Berry. Could have perhaps done with 10-20% more milk+egg mixture to make it looser.

Tim Hunkin is an inventor, genius and writer. He wrote a series of cartoons entitled Almost Everything There Is To Know for the Observer during the 1980s. It lives up to its name. This is what it has to say about snails (click to get a super-sized version):

Circulus, in video:

Long long ago, in a land far away about 10 years ago I used to work with an extremely talented chap called Charlie Muirhead. He was young, good looking etc etc and therefore had lots of talentless blonde female friends. One day two of them called me up about some pointless waste of the web shopping site which they had got their rich daddies to buy for them. They wanted me to fix it for them the day before it was going to launch, and that’s a long story in itself. Well, fuck me if Trinny and Susannah didn’t become a lot richer and more famous than me soon after.
To add insult to injury, I can’t even go into to kitchen without seeing their talentless ugly faces:

I bought a useful set of cookie cutters yesterday so I can make tarts a little bit easier. And how better to try them out with than with these Jane Grigson bakewell tarts?

The sweet shortcrust pastry is 6 oz flour, 3 oz butter, 1 oz sugar. Here my cookie cutters come into play. Unfortunately a cookie cutter isn’t a lot of use if, like me, you’re useless at rolling out pastry.

After cooking for about 25 minutes:

Hmmm … slightly undercooked inside as you can see. As for the taste, I think that a little bit of almond essence wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Having said all that, I’ve eaten three of these today.

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Warning! Behind this cut are scenes of a snail-killing nature!

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They’re in the fridge now, going into hibernation. Come back tomorrow to see me cook them.

Previous snail stories:
(1) Snails captured
(2) Bathtime for snails

In Japanese they call it hasami-mushi, which rather cleverly means “scissors insect”.

“Terror”-nonsense update:
Liquid terror, and hair gel and ipods.

First off we have this delicate Indian Mulligatawny soup.

The alterations: Four times as much chilli as the recipe suggests (and even then it hardly “has a kick”). Twice as much tumeric to make sure of the yellow colour. I blitzed the soup. At the end I added coriander.

Main course was cod, new potatoes, and simple soured cream and chives. The cod would have been much better battered.

The apple pudding was tricky. The apples need to be chopped very fine (as the recipe says). But the cooking times were completely wrong. I needed to cook it for 45 minutes at 160-180°C, but it still wasn’t fully cooked through, so I covered it with foil and gave it another 10 minutes. It is served with cinnamon-flavoured pouring custard. The resulting pudding is truly delicious.

A flummery, a sweet soft pudding made with stewed fruit.

A recipe for Dorset apple cake, and another for sherry trifle on the same page.

Indian Mulligatawny Soup – looks spicy.

This blog has many recipes I want to try: Bakewell tartlets, Oatmeal scones and Scotch pancakes.

Beetroot and blue cheese in filo pastries? Can it work? How about raspberry focaccia?

I’m somewhat dubious about this video of cornstarch apparently being stimulated by high frequency waves. Anyhow, that doesn’t stop me from posting it here:

And here is someone building a motor by hand from just some copper wire, a magnet, some paperclips and a power supply:

Wow, Sounds of London erm I mean The Rifles are playing at ULU.

There’s a bit of history you should know about. Back when I was a student, Thursday night was ULU night. We had an unsigned band. We had the strange stoner woman. We had lots of beer and (for the goths amongst us) snakebite and black. We saw Radiohead play before they were famous. We saw about a million other bands who were never meant to be famous.

I first saw the Sounds of London with my girlfriend back in (we think) 2002. Not sure but I think it was at the Falcon in Camden.

Anyhow, Sounds of London never made it, but they metamorphosed quite recently into the Rifles, and now they’re Big in Japan.

My girlfriend metamorphosed into a wife.

Now we pay 9 quid (plus booking fee) to see them.

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By the way, virtually every photo that I post has been “‘shopped” using The Gimp – an excellent, free replacement for Photoshop.
Can you spot the missing finger in this photograph?